Tweedy Misc
Published 2 Dec 2025For the next instalment of the series of classic British sauces we take a look at the history of gravy.
In this video I look into some of the earliest historical references to gravy, then some 18th Century recipes. I investigate whether gravy might be a derivative of a classic French sauce, and look in some detail into one important component of traditional gravy recipes: the roux, used for thickening.
I also investigate some products which have emerged since the 19th Century to help with the process of making gravy, from gravy salt and gravy browning, through Bisto’s original gravy powder of 1908, and their fully instant product in the form of “gravy granules”, launched in the 1970s.
Also, have you ever wondered why Bisto is called Bisto? We’ll get into that too.
0:00 Introduction
0:32 What is gravy?
1:27 Early history of gravy
2:01 18th Century gravy recipe
2:25 The importance of the roux
3:37 More 18th Century gravy recipes
4:07 Is gravy actually…. French?!?!
5:29 Gravy salt
6:47 Gravy browning
7:31 History of Bisto
9:19 Modern Bisto
10:25 Conclusion
April 10, 2026
A Brief History of GRAVY
QotD: William Cobbett
… The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.
Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.
His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.
Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.
Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.
No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:
The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.
One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.
Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.
John Lewis-Stempel, “Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt”, UnHerd, 2020-08-06.
April 9, 2026
Aly & Kaufman AKB-23: Better Than the SA80 / L85
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Nov 2025The Aly & Kaufman AKB-23 is a set of parts that allows one to use a Brownells BRN-180 upper to create an SA80 / L85 lookalike. It’s a very clever adaptation, based on the fact that the original British L85A1 was essentially copied from the AR-180 design. By creating a new bullpup lower for Brownells’ modernized AR-180 (the BRN-180), the basic mechanics of the SA80 are used, but in a form that is well tested and reliable.
The parts include, of course, the new lower (which is legally a firearm, and requires FFL transfer). The lower is milled aluminum, and uses standard AR fire control parts. It also includes iron sights that mount onto the BRN-180 picatinny rail and a high quality 3D-printed cheek rest and front handguard.
This is a really fun rifle, and a very clever way to create an L85 analog that is affordable and accessible.
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April 8, 2026
“Queering the Past”
It sometimes seems as though modern historians are spending all their time postulating that pretty much every prominent figure in western history was gay or lesbian or trans*. The latest attempt to present someone from British history as being trans is Queen Elizabeth I (admittedly in a drama rather than a documentary):
The “Darnley Portrait” of Elizabeth I of England (circa 1575).
National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
Appropriately, it was April Fool’s Day when I read that Queen Elizabeth I is to be portrayed as a cross-dressing man in a forthcoming television show. But we live in times when the more silly and outlandish a rumoured cultural or political plan, the more likely it is to be true. Majesty – an oddly “heritage” title for a project that clearly considers itself “transgressive” – is set to film this summer, and is seeking “trans actresses” (what we used to call cross-dressers, before they got really cross) to play the monarch.
The Sun, which first reported it, seemed drearily inclined to go along with the usual sexist claims of the trans lobby. “She is known for having traits associated with a male monarch”, it mouthed in a mealy manner in an article last week. What would those be – not getting her tits out for, if not the cameras, then the portrait painters of the era? “Some have speculated she had male pseudo-hermaphroditism, known as testicular feminisation”, the Sun continued, also noting that “others are obsessed with the Bisley Boy myth”. Yes, “obsessed” isn’t too extreme a word here – I often hear people at bus stops discussing the Bisley Boy myth. This is the claim that Princess Elizabeth died in her youth and was replaced by a local boy with red hair. It was popularised by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters – because Bram “Dracula” Stoker never made up far-fetched stories based extremely loosely on real people, did he?
The Sun quoted a “TV insider” who insists: “Most historians dismiss the claims as misogyny motivated by the idea no woman could be as strong or capable without actually being a man. But it’s a theory which captures the imagination and appears to answer a lot of other questions around the unique queen.”
What would these questions be? That Elizabeth never married and had no children? Must be a bloke, then – what real woman would forego such unqualified pleasures? It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the “trans community” and their inordinate number of “allies” – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media.
This, of course, is our old mate “Queering the Past” (or “lying” as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that “trans Vikings” existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship “through a queer lens”. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental”.
April 7, 2026
“The Eight Hundred Years of Oppression”
On Substack, Upper Canadian Cavalier examines “The Irish Question”:
Every confidence scheme requires three things. A mark who is sympathetic. A grievance real enough to be credible. And an operator whose entire livelihood depends on ensuring the grievance is never actually resolved. Resolution ends the game. The operator does not want justice. He wants the next fundraising dinner.
Irish nationalism, in its mature institutional form, is one of the longest-running confidence schemes in the history of democratic politics. This is not to say the underlying grievances were invented. English rule in Ireland produced genuine catastrophes, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read much history. The point is not that the wounds were fake. The point is that a very specific class of people discovered, sometime in the nineteenth century, that a bleeding wound is worth considerably more than a healed one, and they have been salting it professionally ever since.
The operators of this scheme are not a conspiracy in any tidy sense. They do not meet in a room. They are, rather, an ecosystem: the Sinn Féin political class, the Irish-American fundraising establishment, the Gaelic cultural bureaucracy with its language boards and arts councils and grant committees, and undergirding all of it for most of its history, the Catholic Church, which managed the remarkable trick of positioning itself as the spiritual soul of Irish resistance while simultaneously running the country’s schools, hospitals, orphanages, and laundries with the administrative efficiency of a medium-sized colonial power. They share no common mailing list. They share something considerably more durable: a common interest in a people who define themselves entirely by what was done to them, because such a people will always need someone to explain what it means.
That someone, naturally, has a salary. Sometimes several.
Part One: The Invoice That Never Clears
The foundational text of Irish identity is not a poem or a legal document or a philosophical treatise. It is an invoice. The Eight Hundred Years of Oppression, presented at every available occasion, never stamped paid, accruing interest at a rate that defies actuarial calculation. It is invoked at pub tables and university seminars and Boston fundraisers and Sinn Féin press conferences with the solemn regularity of a liturgical response, which is appropriate, since it has become one.
Eight hundred years. Let us sit with that number for a moment, because it deserves scrutiny rather than reverence.
The Poles were partitioned entirely out of existence for a hundred and twenty-three years, absorbed simultaneously by three empires, had their language banned, their nobility liquidated, their clergy persecuted, and their country removed from the map of Europe with a finality that the Irish situation never approached. They rebuilt it. They were then invaded again from both sides at once within living memory, occupied by The Nazis and Soviets losing somewhere between five and six million citizens in six years. They do not, as a general rule, organize their entire national identity around the experience. They built things instead.
The Armenians experienced something so total it required the coinage of an entirely new word to describe it. The Acadians were physically deported. The Welsh had their language suppressed for centuries by a state apparatus that regarded Welsh-speaking children as candidates for corrective intervention, which is considerably more systematic than anything the Penal Laws produced. The Greeks spent nearly four centuries under actual Ottoman administration, not the notional suzerainty that characterized much of the Anglo-Irish relationship, and emerged and got on with being Greeks.
None of them made Eight Hundred Years into a brand.
What distinguishes the Irish accounting of oppression is not the severity of the oppression, which was real but not historically singular, but the extraordinary care with which it has been packaged, maintained, and exported. The Famine, which ended in the 1850s, is still discussed in certain Irish-American circles as a recent bereavement requiring ongoing condolences and, more usefully, ongoing donations. The emotional statute of limitations has never been permitted to run. Each generation receives the invoice freshly printed, as though the debt were personally owed to them and personally owed by someone who can still be made to feel bad about it.
April 5, 2026
How to Make Marbled Eggs for Easter – The Victorian Way
English Heritage
Published 23 Mar 2018If you’d like to try this recipe at home, make sure to be very careful when handling/blowing the eggs. In some countries chickens are not vaccinated against salmonella so we suggest giving the eggs a good wash in boiling water and take care not to get any raw egg in your mouth.
This recipe for Marbled Eggs would have been served as a sweet “entremets” — small dishes served before dessert. This particular version uses a sweetened cream filling with chocolate and vanilla, but you could use any flavour you like or experiment with different colour jellies.
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April 1, 2026
QotD: “Colour-blind” casting
As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.
First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.
The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?
I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.
Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.
David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.
March 30, 2026
Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)
Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:
Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.
Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.
What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.
National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.
It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.
As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:
by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.
Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.
Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.
March 27, 2026
The Greatest Scoundrel Story Ever Written
Lotuseaters Dot Com
Published 29 Nov 2025Luca is joined by Dan to discuss Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. They explore Fraser’s skill in writing historical fiction, the genius of the Harry Flashman character, and the sheer hilarity of the novel’s dark humour.
March 26, 2026
An alternative reading of the American Revolution
As the majority of my current readers are Americans (or Chinese folks using VPNs to pretend to be Americans), the following could be interpreted as clickbait. Just sayin’.
Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests that the events leading up to the Anglo-Colonial unpleasantness of 1776 onwards have been subject to a preferred reading that tidies up all the inconvenient details and sweeps them under the rug of a revolution against “royal tyranny” (even though HRM King George III was much more liberal than he’s ever given credit for, and a revolution against “an elected Parliament” doesn’t have the right ring to it):
Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The American founding narrative is a document produced by a litigation class to justify actions already taken. Its authors were not philosophers who became rebels. They were rebels who hired philosophers.
This is not a fringe position. It is not the invention of bitter foreigners or tenured radicals looking to dismantle something they never understood. It is the conclusion you reach when you put down the mythology and pick up the actual historical record, the ledgers, the court documents, the correspondence that was never meant to be read by posterity, the testimony of people who were there and whose version of events was systematically buried because they were on the losing side. The American Revolution is the most comprehensively mythologized event in the history of the English-speaking world, and the mythologizing began before the gunpowder had cleared.
Start with the money, because it almost always starts with the money. The Navigation Acts, which colonial propagandists framed as instruments of imperial oppression, were a trade regulatory system that had been in place for over a century and under which the colonies had grown from scattered coastal settlements into some of the most prosperous communities in the Atlantic world. The specific enforcement measures that triggered the revolutionary crisis came after the Seven Years War, a conflict in which Britain spent the modern equivalent of billions of pounds defending the American colonies against French and indigenous pressure across an entire continent. When the war ended in 1763, the British national debt had nearly doubled. Parliament looked at the colonies, looked at the bill, and suggested with what strikes any disinterested observer as elementary reasonableness that the people who had benefited most from the war might contribute something toward its cost.
The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed legal documents, newspapers, and pamphlets at rates that were substantially lower than what ordinary subjects in Britain were already paying. The Townshend Acts taxed glass, paint, paper, and tea, luxury goods, not necessities. At their peak, the total tax burden on the American colonies amounted to roughly one shilling per person per year. The average British subject at home was paying twenty-six shillings. The colonial merchant class, which had grown fat on a century of salutary neglect and profitable smuggling, responded to this modest request for contribution with riots, the formation of extralegal enforcement committees, the physical destruction of property, and the systematic intimidation of anyone who disagreed. They called this liberty.
John Hancock, whose signature on the Declaration of Independence is so oversized that his name became a synonym for a signature, was the wealthiest smuggler in colonial America. His fortune was built on molasses, wine, and dry goods moved outside the official imperial trade system at substantial profit. In 1768, British customs officials seized his sloop Liberty on evidence of wine smuggling. The seizure triggered a riot. The customs commissioners were driven from Boston under threat of violence and had to take refuge on a Royal Navy vessel in the harbor. Hancock was prosecuted and represented by John Adams, who got the charges dropped on procedural grounds. The same John Adams who would later write the Massachusetts Constitution. The same John Adams who, when asked to describe his greatest service to his country, cited his defense of the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial. These relationships are not incidental. They are the operating structure of the revolutionary movement.
The Boston Massacre has been taught to American schoolchildren for two hundred and fifty years as evidence of British brutality. Here is what actually happened. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a small detachment of British soldiers posted outside the Custom House was surrounded by a crowd estimated at several hundred people, who pelted them with ice, rocks, oyster shells, and pieces of coal, struck them with clubs and sticks, and screamed at them to fire, daring them repeatedly to shoot. Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked to the ground by a club blow. When he recovered he fired. The other soldiers, believing an order had been given, fired as well. Five people died. It was a tragedy. What happened next is the part that gets edited out of the curriculum. John Adams, cousin of the great agitator Samuel Adams, agreed to defend the soldiers and did so brilliantly. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted outright. The remaining two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and were released after being branded on the thumb, the standard punishment. The jury found that the crowd had been the aggressor. Adams later wrote that the case was one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country, by which he meant he had established a legal record that contradicted the propaganda his cousin was already distributing. The propaganda survived. The verdict did not make it into the textbooks.
Samuel Adams, the moral conscience of the Revolution, the man who could manufacture outrage from raw air, had a financial history that his hagiographers handle with extraordinary delicacy. He had inherited his father’s malting business and run it into insolvency. He had then served as a tax collector for the town of Boston and accumulated a personal shortfall of several thousand pounds, money he had collected and failed to remit, that the town had been attempting to recover from him through legal action for years. He was an active defendant in debt proceedings during the very period when he was organizing the Sons of Liberty and writing pamphlets about the tyranny of arbitrary taxation. The Revolution did not merely advance Samuel Adams’s political philosophy. It made his financial problems disappear. When you understand this, his extraordinary energy in the cause of independence begins to look less like principle and more like survival.
QotD: “Instead of the unsinkable battleship we have the unsinkable Military Expert …”
Where now are the men who told us those things? Still on the job, drawing fat salaries. Instead of the unsinkable battleship we have the unsinkable Military Expert …
George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1943-12-17.
Update, 27 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
March 24, 2026
“Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book”
In The Critic, Ben Sexsmith reviews a new book by Matt Goodwin, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity:
Here is an exceptionally easy argument to make:
- Mass migration is ensuring that the historical majority in Britain is becoming a minority.
- This is the result of policies that have been pursued regardless of popular opinion.
- This has had many kinds of destructive consequences.
The first claim is so obviously true that one might as well deny the greenness of the grass. The second is proven by decades of broken promises (see Anthony Bowles’s article “Immigration and Consent” for more). The third requires argumentation, but I think that it is clear if one considers hideous incidences of terrorism, grooming gangs and violent censoriousness, as well as broader trends of economic dependency and electoral sectarianism.
Again, this is not a difficult argument to make. So why is it made so badly?
Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation is a very bad book. It reads like the book of a political operator extending his CV. The left-wing commentator Andy Twelves caused a stir on social media by pointing out various factual mistakes and what appear to be non-existent quotes. Twelves speculates that these “quotes” are the result of AI hallucinations, which is plausible, if not proven, in the light of the fact that two of Mr Goodwin’s sparse footnotes contain source information from ChatGPT.
Inasmuch as Suicide of a Nation makes a form of the argument sketched out the beginning of this article, there is truth to it. But it contains a fundamental problem — it assumes that this argument is so true that there is no requirement to make it well.
“Slop” is an overused term but it feels painfully appropriate for a book that is spoon fed to its audience. Goodwin, who had a long academic career before becoming a successful commentator, is not a man who lacks intelligence. But he writes as if he thinks his audience lacks it. “I did not write this book for the ruling class”, writes Goodwin, “I wrote it for the forgotten majority”. Alas, he seems to think that the average member of the “forgotten majority” has the reading level of a dimwitted 12-year-old. As well as being stylistically simple, the book is full of annoying paternal asides. “In the pages ahead I shall walk you through what is happening to the country …” “In the next chapter we will begin our journey …” Thank you, Mr Goodwin. Can we stop for ice cream?
The book is terribly derivative, with a title that reflects Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower and a subtitle — “Immigration, Islam, Identity” — that all but repeats that of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe — “Immigration, Identity, Islam”. It is written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI. I’m not saying it was AI-generated. (Indeed, a brief assessment using AI checkers suggests that it was not.) I’m just saying that it might as well have been.
Baking the Original Apple Pie from Medieval England
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 Sept 2025Hot water crust pie filled with mashed apples and pears with raisins, figs, and spices
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1390This is the first recorded recipe for apple pie, written in England around 1390 in The Forme of Cury. As many historical recipes are, this one is bare bones and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The “good spices” in the recipe could mean basically any combination of spices you like. I think this is probably referring to a popular medieval spice mixture called poudre douce, whose exact contents varied from cook to cook. Popular spices included cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, black pepper, long pepper, cardamom, ginger, galangal, and cloves, so feel free to experiment and make up your own.
Whichever spices you use will affect how familiar or exotic the pie tastes, and I really enjoyed the version I made. It’s not too sweet with most of the sweetness coming from the fruit, and I found the spices to be really strong but really pleasant. Unlike modern apple pies, the filling is more of a compote texture, but it holds together nicely. It’s a perfect recipe to try for the fall.
For to make Tartys in Applis.
Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and wan they are wel ybrayed coloured with Safron well and do yt in a cofyn and yt forth to bake wel.
— The Forme of Cury c. 1390
March 23, 2026
The REAL History of Worcestershire Sauce (and a few others …)
Tweedy Misc
Published 20 Nov 2025A look into the history of Worcestershire Sauce, and some other related sauces and condiments originating in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In doing so I try to understand whether Lea and Perrins created something brand new in their Worcestershire Sauce of the 1830s, or whether it was more an evolution of other similar styles of sauce which already existed at that time like Harvey’s Sauce, and Reading Sauce … and in turn do both of those owe something to an even earlier condiment — Quin’s Sauce …?
I also debunk an oft retold (particularly here in YouTube) story about Baron Sandys returning from a post as the Governor of Bengal being the inspiration for Lea and Perrins’ Worcestershire Sauce — it’s almost certainly not true.
0:00 Introduction
0:55 What is Worcestershire Sauce?
1:22 Ingredients and Recipes
3:01 History of Worcestershire Sauce
6:33 Food in Georgian England
7:51 Hare Soup!
8:22 Harvey’s Sauce
11:00 Reading Sauce
13:21 Quin’s Sauce
14:49 Yorkshire Relish
16:04 Henderson’s Relish
17:02 Conclusion
He also posted an addendum to this video.
March 21, 2026
The second naval battle of Narvik
On his Substack, James Holland recounts the events of April, 1940 when British and German ships fought savagely for the port of Narvik in the north of Norway. The first battle had resulted in the loss of several destroyers on each side and the deaths of the commanders as well. A couple of days later, the Royal Navy sent in a more powerful force to eliminate the surviving ships of the Kriegsmarine and secure the port for landing allied troops:
Narvik harbour after the first battle, April 1940.
The next few days were marked by caution and ponderousness by both sides. Now commanding the German flotilla was Kapitän Erich Bey. His remaining ships were trapped unless he moved them swiftly. This meant refuelling as soon as possible from the surviving oiler, making the damaged ships seaworthy, then using bad weather, darkness and supporting U-boats to sneak out past the British in the Vestfjord beyond the Ofotfjord. Although the ships were all refuelled and engines repaired, he then suffered a further calamity when the Zenke damaged her propellers manouevring around the wrecks in Narvik harbour, and the Köllner also caused debilitating damage while refuelling and made herself unseaworthy. Difficult though it was to manoeuvre in the narrow confines of Narvik, these were entirely avoidable and self-inflicted own goals. The British, meanwhile, reeling from the rapid German advances through southern Norway and uncertain what plan to now pursue, dithered from a lack of clear, unified and determined decision-making, so that it was not until the morning of 13th April that they returned, this time with four larger tribal-class destroyers, five further destroyers and the mighty battleship, HMS Warspite, all under the command of Admiral Whitworth.
Kapitän Bey had known the Royal Navy were coming, partly because German cryptanalysts had deciphered British naval codes, but also because it was blindingly obvious they would do. He tried to deploy his ships as well as he might but knew in his heart the situation was hopeless. The crippled Köllner was towed to Taarstadt, an inlet beyond Ballangen, where it was to lie in wait, unseen, for the arrival of the British then fire her torpedoes and guns and hope for the best. She had only reached the inlet at Djupvik, some 20 miles west from Narvik, when she was spotted by the Warspite‘s Swordfish floatplane late in the morning of 13th April. As the leading British ships, Bedouin and Eskimo, turned the headland, their guns and torpedoes were trained and ready. Köllner‘s bow was ripped off by the first torpedo and the rest of her sunk soon after. That was three of the ten now at the bottom of the fjord. The remaining seven had barely begun moving before the rest of the British force were bearing down upon them through the mist, frost and snow. First, though, ten Swordfish, flown from the aircraft carrier, HMS Furious, swooped down. Their orders were to dive-bomb the German ships, a role for which they were not suited; Swordfish, slow, ungainly biplanes, were designed to fly in low and drop torpedoes, a role to which they were, in fact, very well suited. As dive-bombers, however, they hit nothing but lost two of their own in an entirely fruitless attack.
It was also completely unnecessary as Whitworth’s force had the matter firmly in hand. The German destroyers, still nursing the damage of four days earlier, swiftly fired all their remaining ammunition and were now effectively sitting ducks. Bey ordered them into the narrow Rombaksfjord, east and to the north of Narvik, where they were hotly pursued by Eskimo, Bedouin and even Warspite. Here the fjord narrowed to a few hundred yards before widening to half a mile but with the high mountain sides looming over this gloomily dark and slender channel, there was nowhere for the surviving German destroyers to go. The Künne was dispatched by Bedouin, and although the Georg Thiele fired one last torpedo that blew off the bow of Eskimo, her captain then ran her aground like the Hardy, while the surviving three, the Zenke, Von Armin and Lüdemann, steamed to the head of the fjord where they, too, deliberately ran themselves aground. The crews all then made good their escape into the mountains to join the Gebirgsjäger [mountain troops] that had disembarked five days earlier and who were still holding a shallow bridgehead around Narvik.
The second British naval action off Narvik. A diagram of the battle of 13 April 1940.
Imperial War MuseumAmazingly, Eskimo remained afloat, sailing stern-first back out of the fjord and to safety. She was repaired and would fight again, not least against the Bismarck in May 1941. But here in the waters around Narvik, the naval battle was now over, with half the Kriegsmarine‘s destroyer fleet sunk and lost — a disaster from which it could not hope to recover. A golden opportunity to send in decisive numbers of Allied troops to fight and defeat the beleaguered German troops in Narvik was now laid out on a plate. Southern Norway might have already been lost but the north — and, crucially, the iron-ore railway line and port — lay there for the taking — on paper, at any rate. British, French and Polish troops were eventually landed but this was not a part of the world where landing and maintaining supplies was at all straightforward. Britain had only a few basic landing craft at this early stage of the war, there were few beaches and its geographical remoteness and weather made a difficult task even harder. As it happened, by early June, the Allies did have victory there within their grasp, but by then, France was being overrun and facing defeat and the Allies decided the better part of valour was to pull out while they had the chance and consolidate in Britain instead. The Allied expedition to Norway was over.
The ramifications of the naval battle were significant, however. The Kriegsmarine not only lost half their destroyer fleet, but also one of two heavy cruisers, two of six light cruisers and six U-boats, leaving their navy woefully depleted. It also meant their plans for a successful surface fleet marauding in the Atlantic had been left in tatters. The U-boats, withdrawn from the Atlantic for the campaign, hit not a single vessel, largely due to problems with the magnetic ignition pistols on their torpedoes. For the three months they were tied up in the waters around Norway, they were not in the Atlantic, giving Britain a vital free pass as convoys sailed unimpeded. During the critical summer months of 1940, this was to prove a hugely important lifeline. Norway had been clinically subdued by Germany but it would cost Hitler more than half a million troops, all told, as well the costly construction of the Atlantic Wall in the years to come — a series of bunkers, coastal gun batteries and barracks in some of the remotest outposts of Europe and at an untold cost in men, resources and money. Norway would become an albatross around Nazi Germany’s neck, while its value to the Kriegsmarine was negligible.
The grave of Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, VC, RN, in Narvik.
Photo by James Holland
